The AI Notebook That Checks Whether Its Own Citations Are Real

You've been there. You ask an AI model a question about your own documents, it gives you a confident answer, and you have no idea whether it made any of it up. You could go digging through your files to verify—but that's exactly the work you were trying to avoid. IncarnaMind is an open-source desktop app that tries to close that gap: it's a notebook where you write and ask questions in one place, and every answer cites where each claim came from, with the quote checked against the source.

What It Does

IncarnaMind is a free, open-source desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux. The core unit is a "Mind"—a notebook for a single topic. You write in it like you would in any editor, and there's a question box at the foot of the Mind. Ask a Question, and the Answer lands in your draft at your cursor as editable text. You're not switching between a chat window and a document; it's one surface.

The interesting part is the citation checking. Answers cite where each claim came from and carry the quote, which is verified against that place. A green check means the quote is actually there. An amber mark means it isn't. Click a citation and it opens the page with the quote highlighted. That's the whole pitch, and it's a meaningful one—verification is usually the step everyone skips.

On the file side, you link the folders you already use (Zotero's storage folder included), and IncarnaMind reads what's in them where they sit. It handles PDF, Word (comments included), PowerPoint, Excel, CSV, Markdown, and plain text. It never moves or changes your files, and it keeps up as they change. For bigger libraries, tags get added for you, and the app can sort Documents into your Folders. It runs on your computer, and you choose the AI model—Claude, GPT, DeepSeek, or a local model through Ollama.

Why It's Cool

• The citation check is the feature. Plenty of tools will quote your documents back at you. Far fewer will tell you when the quote doesn't hold up. The green-check/amber-mark distinction is a small design decision with a big effect: it turns "trust me" into something you can actually inspect.

• Write and ask in one place is the right shape. Most RAG-style tools bolt a chat panel onto a document viewer. Here the Answer lands in your draft at your cursor. That means the output of asking is a document you're building, not a transcript you'll copy-paste later.

• Your files stay yours. Linking folders in place rather than importing them is a real practical difference. If you already have a Zotero library or a directory tree you've maintained for years, you don't have to reorganize anything. The app reads where the files are and leaves them alone.

• Model choice, including local. Claude, GPT, DeepSeek, and Ollama are all on the table. If you want to keep everything on your machine, the local option is there. If you want the strongest model for a hard question, you can pick that instead.

• It's honest about what isn't done. The README is upfront that asking about selected cells in Excel, comparison tables across contracts, Word tracked changes and comments, meeting transcripts, and background Tasks are coming next, not shipped. That kind of labeling is worth noting—you know what you're getting today.

How to Try It

IncarnaMind isn't released yet. When it is, the Releases page will have installers for macOS (Apple silicon and Intel), Windows, and Linux. To get notified, click Watch, then Custom, then Releases at the top of the repo.

If you'd rather run it now, you can build from source. You'll need Node.js 24 or newer:

git clone https://github.com/junruxiong/IncarnaMind.git && cd IncarnaMind
npm install && npm run dev

A couple of platform notes worth knowing ahead of time, since the app isn't code-signed or notarized yet:

• On Windows, you'll likely see "Windows protected your PC." Click More info, then Run anyway.
• On macOS, you may need to open it once, click Done, then go to System Settings, Privacy & Security, and Open Anyway. Alternatively: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/IncarnaMind.app. One consequence of being unsigned is that the Mac app can't update itself—it'll tell you when a new version is out and point you at the download page.
• On Linux, run chmod +x IncarnaMind-*.AppImage. On Ubuntu 22.04 or later you'll also need sudo apt install libfuse2 (or libfuse2t64 on 24.04 and later).

The repository is at github.com/junruxiong/IncarnaMind, and it's Apache-2.0 licensed.

Final Thoughts

IncarnaMind is aimed at people who work with a lot of their own documents—researchers, lawyers, analysts, anyone with a folder full of PDFs and a nagging sense that the AI is making things up. The citation verification is the reason to care, and the in-place file linking means you don't have to change how you've organized anything to try it. The main caveat is timing: it isn't released yet, so today you're either building from source or waiting. If the idea of an answer that shows its work appeals to you, it's worth a watch on the repo.

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